What target audience? Doesn't everyone and their mom use Facebook now, pretty much? Seems to me its biggest competitor for attention is TV.

To me this stuff is fairly simple - but I don't use Facebook anymore fwiw.

There were a bunch of prior attempts at large scale social networking like this and they pretty much all ran into issues with scaling. Facebook handled this adeptly, plus they didn't allow their user-base to turn into a total cesspool through ridiculous customizations + features that made it act like a hookup service ala MySpace, which is why they ate their lunch.

Now the network effects are extreme with nearly a billion served - so it's not exactly hard to keep users' attention when most of their friends and family use the service as well. And I haven't seen any viable competitors come across except Google+ which doesn't seem to be a real threat. So I'm not sure who exactly is nipping at their heels unless we're thinking of a different way of attacking social ala Pinterest (and formerly Instagram :)... which I think is what it will take. You won't outdo them by being a better them. It seems to me most of their innovation has been in a way to set up better ways to monetize or lock in their mass of user data.

Exactly. 1 billion people is a pretty broad target market.

I don't understand your point. What does maturity have to do with "the right mindset to steer something as pliable as a web app into a product that keeps up with the non-stop competition for users' attention?"

My point was the product is geared towards the immature, and his being immature for so many years gives him an advantage in understanding both the product and his target audience. Yes you could train a mature person to think like a college kid, and maybe they could even hearken back to their college days for reference, but the times they are a-changin' and what's been considered cool for the past decade won't be next decade. Thus my point was: will Zuck be able to keep up with what's cool as he gets old and out of touch? My opinion is that being mature is actually a detriment here.

The only person who seems to have been able to do this on a grand scale even when he matured was Jobs.

Age group is not the determining factor there.

It is, but in the reverse factor, I mean the normal factor, that which is stating the common sense fact that the more experienced you are the more you can do difficult things (including putting yourself in the shoes of young immature people)

It seems crazy that just for 2 examples of youngster having been promoted on the front page of magazines suddenly everyone seem to think only young people can do that.

As far as I can tell, and in fact I don;t care that much, Steve Jobs was not very young, neither is Jeff Bezos. The founder on the web company where I work is look young, but not that young, I'd guess over his forties.

I think the best founders are those that have (1) experience and (2) are still hungry.

Zack bypassed requirement #1 simply because it received enough funding to not worry about the first problem you have when starting a business (having revenue). He's also smart and probably picked up the required experience on his way.

On the other hand there are plenty of youngsters that fail because of a lack of experience, once confronted with the harsh realities of running a business, and there are also plenty of seniors that fail simply because they are not hungry enough, which limits their creativity.

> So the question then becomes: What happens when Zuck is too mature to see what's coming next?

He can buy/hire people who are good at that.

Every company is staffed with "good" people; some are not that good, and some are not listened to.

But will he listen to them? What if "they" can't even agree amongst themselves? How would he decide?

A heavy theme of the article is how good Zuck is at building a suitable management team. He'll have to pick a Tim Cook someday.

Where did he ever have to actually show this quality of keeping up with competition? So far there simply hasn't been any "next big thing" that facebook would have to actually be afraid of. They have so incredibly many users, that alone makes them de-facto untouchable as of now. Even google plus could not change that. All of this might change some time in the future, just like it did for myspace and there was nothing they could have done about it if you ask me.